GE and the Industrial Internet

Abstract

CEO Jeff Immelt considers whether GE is moving fast enough on its new Industrial Internet initiative. The undertaking includes building out an Industrial Internet, connecting machines and devices, collecting their data and operations, and providing services to clients based on analytics of this data and information. The case considers the implications of such an initiative across all 6 of GE's business units, and how best and how quickly to execute the strategy. The firm has committed $1b in investment, building out a new software center in California, and a commercial sales function at headquarters to deploy the new products and services.

CEO Jeff Immelt considers whether GE is moving fast enough on its new Industrial Internet initiative. The undertaking includes building out an Industrial Internet, connecting machines and devices, collecting their data and operations, and providing services to clients based on analytics of this data and information. The case considers the implications of such an initiative across all 6 of GE's business units, and how best and how quickly to execute the strategy. The firm has committed $1b in investment, building out a new software center in California, and a commercial sales function at headquarters to deploy the new products and services.

Organizations in science and elsewhere often rely on committees of experts to make important decisions, such as evaluating early-stage projects and ideas. However, very little is known about how experts influence each other’s opinions and how that influence affects final evaluations. Here, we use a field experiment in scientific peer review to examine experts’ susceptibility to the opinions of others. We recruited 277 faculty members at seven U.S. medical schools to evaluate 47 early stage research proposals in biomedicine. In our experiment, evaluators (1) completed independent reviews of research ideas, (2) received (artificial) scores attributed to anonymous “other reviewers” from the same or a different discipline, and (3) decided whether to update their initial scores. Evaluators did not meet in person and were not otherwise aware of each other. We find that, even in a completely anonymous setting and controlling for a range of career factors, women updated their scores 13% more often than men, while very highly cited “superstar” reviewers updated 24% less often than others. Women in male-dominated subfields were particularly likely to update, updating 8% more for every 10% decrease in subfield representation. Very low scores were particularly “sticky” and seldom updated upward, suggesting a possible source of conservatism in evaluation. These systematic differences in how world-class experts respond to external opinions can lead to substantial gender and status disparities in whose opinion ultimately matters in collective expert judgment.

Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze 1,237 employees, 118 proposals, and quality evaluations for more than 12,000 evaluator-proposal pairs. The analysis shows that solicitations offering a personal reward for top submissions boost participation rates without affecting submission quality. We show that this is due to workers partially internalizing the positive effects of their submissions on the other individuals in the workplace. We also find that offering employees project funding to implement their own proposals potentially backfires, undermining participation. And solicitations emphasizing mission-oriented goals, like improving patient care, are sensitive to the solicited person’s gender, with women responding more than men. These results shed light on the factors that drive employees’ engagement in organizational tasks, beyond regular duties, and provide insights on how to design incentives to foster contributions to public goods inside organizations.